Conclusion

Atomic Heart is fresh shooter material that reminds me of Bioshock and Wolfenstein, thanks to a dystopian alternate reality that's well-crafted and believable, with great level design in several locations. For $60 you're getting an entertaining shooter experience that focuses not only on shooting, but you also have to solve some puzzles. The puzzles are fairly simple in difficulty though, but sometimes a bit annoying due to other game mechanics (no spoilers). The main story is alright, nothing we haven't heard before, I still wanted to learn what's going on and why. Our main hero is a grumpy dude that's somewhere between sarcastic and snappy, a bit over the top sometimes—not unlike some dialogues in Forspoken. Overall it's a decent game, do check out the reviews from our colleagues.

In terms of graphics, Atomic Heart can impress, I would rate the graphics at "good." If you've taken a look at our screenshots you'll agree that some areas look stunning, especially when it comes to textures and shadows, and then there's levels that remind of games 15 years ago. Overall it seems to me like the team responsible for the textures did a fantastic job, while the people doing the level design were more focused on pushing out content quickly than to polish it with lots of geometric fidelity. NPCs have surprisingly low texture and model details, almost reminding me of a cartoon art style—but that doesn't match the highly detailed textures of the rest of the game. Only a minority of the gameplay happens in the open world—here the vegetation, trees and map geometry look excellent, next-gen I'd say. Just like many other recent titles, the developer chose to use Unreal Engine 4 to power their game. DirectX 12 is the only API available, which makes sense, considering they are implementing technologies such as DLSS and ray tracing, which only work on DX12. NVIDIA has been promoting "Atomic Heart with RTX On" since 2018 (!). The release this week comes without any hint of ray tracing support, the devs say "it will be added at a later time, no ETA." No idea what went wrong here, but Atomic Heart kinda doesn't need ray tracing anyway. The developers did a great job adding good-looking reflections, especially in the intro map. Here they are going beyond just screen-space reflections and are including cubemaps/planar reflections, too. The latter still work, even when the original object is not in the viewport—good job!

When I hear "Unreal Engine 4," I think "ugh stutter." Shader compilation is present in Atomic Heart, too, but the developers solved the problem in the best possible way. On startup, the main menu will show a progress bar "Compiling Shaders," which will run for a few minutes. In other games you have to wait—here you are free to either wait or start the game right away. This is clever: if you choose to override the shader compilation you'll be aware that this is your own choice and thus you are willing to accept some stuttering; or you can just wait it out like in other games. Once all the shaders are compiled there's no noteworthy stutter in-game, I also didn't spot any texture pop-ins or similar UE4 issues.

VRAM requirements are a total non-issue for modern graphics cards. Despite the good textures, there's less than 8 GB used at 4K, and slightly above 6 GB at 1440p—there's no card that will lose performance because it runs out of memory. 1080p at highest settings uses 6 GB, which, to be technically precise is the allocation, not the actual usage for each frame, so even cards with 4 GB should be alright, or you can dial settings down a little bit.

Atomic Heart is yet another AAA game that neither AMD nor NVIDIA have released an optimized driver for, which is a shame. People spending 1000 bucks or more on a graphics card should get the best possible driver support. Only Intel has pushed out an update, which could be the reason why their Arc A770 graphics card is doing so well in Atomic Heart. While we usually see the A770 near RX 6600 XT performance levels, here it's one tier faster, sitting right in the middle between RTX 3070 and RX 6700 XT.

Update Feb 22 10 PM UTC: AMD has released their Radeon 23.2.2 drivers this evening, which add support for Atomic Heart. All AMD results have been retested on that driver, the performance gain is around 1-2% for RX 7900 XT/XTX and 1% for 6800/6900 at 4K.

Performance requirements of Atomic Heart are high, but much better than the other releases this year. In order to reach 60 FPS at the 1080p Full HD resolution you need a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 3070, or a Radeon RX 6700 XT. The RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3070 even reach 60 FPS at 1440p, on the AMD side you need an RX 6800 XT at least. 4K Ultra HD at 60 FPS or higher is possible with RTX 3090 and faster, or Radeon RX 7900 XT/XTX. Our test scene is benchmarked in the open world section of the game, most of the time you'll be fighting in indoor areas with limited view distance, which run at higher FPS. Lowering the settings helps quite a bit. You can gain a lot of FPS, especially outdoors, by lowering the details. While the difference between maximum and lowest is not huge, it's still better than in other new titles. Even the lowest preset looks pretty good and will give you around +50% extra performance. On top of that you can enable DLSS upscaling or Frame Generation, if you have an NVIDIA GPU. On the AMD side only the first generation FSR is available, which is a shame, as FSR 2 looks so much better and is very easy to implement for game devs, especially when a game already has DLSS support.